Death and the Running Patterer (15 page)
Read Death and the Running Patterer Online
Authors: Robin Adair
CAPTAIN CROTTY, A flowing cape over his green-faced uniform, acknowledged the sentry’s salute as he strode past the guardroom and vanished toward the port.
“Taking the long road round to Madame Greene’s, I’ll be bound,” muttered the redcoat. “Lucky bastard!”
BUT THERE WOULD be no Madame Greene on duty to greet any nocturnal visitors to her bordello. She left her parlor and moved quietly down Middlesex Lane, past the jail. As she turned right and crossed George Street, heading south toward Bridge Street, her outline was spotted by the same guard who had seen Captain Crotty leave the barracks.
He called the sight to the attention of his mate. Not that they intended to do anything about it. Their job was to check people getting into, or out of, the barracks. What people did in the streets outside didn’t matter a rat’s arse. But it was interesting nonetheless. The oddest people flitted through the town at all hours. This bulky figure staggered slightly and paused periodically, as if for air.
“Just a bloody Indian full of bull,” said the second soldier dismissively, as they stamped off on their rounds.
IN AN UPSTAIRS bedroom at Government House, Eliza Darling sat up with a start at an unexpected noise. It sounded like the stairs creaking. There it was again. She considered whether to call Ralph softly (he was only “Ralph” in their most private lives; at other times he was always “General” or “the governor”) from his bed-chamber next door.
No. She decided it was only her imagination. She had not been sleeping well lately, she acknowledged with a sigh. But Ralph, well, he slept like a baby. A baby; she sighed again, deeply. It was little more than a month since one of her—their—babies, Edward, had died in the whooping cough epidemic that had swept the settlement. The Darlings had a large brood but that did not stop the loss hurting her deeply. She tormented herself with the thought that, had she not agreed to come to the colony, her child would not have died.
She kept up a brave face and few noticed any change in her fine features and gracious air. She had publicly said of the loss only that “a few selfish tears will fall, but God knows best, and I can say, I hope with resignation, His will be done.” Privately, she thought she could see new gray in her dark hair and lines around her bright brown eyes, even though she would not be thirty for two months.
Ralph, well, Ralph was a quarter-century older. He had his military career and his work here, unhappy though it had become. When they were first offered the colony she had jokingly called it “Bottomless Bay.” Now he was depressed by opposition from the Emancipists and almost obsessed with identifying with the Exclusives. And she felt empty. It was, indeed, all “bottomless” for both of them.
Suddenly there was another sound. Eliza shivered. Intruders! The noise was at the front door. Now she realized that it was coming from outside, a thought that drew her from her bed to the window. In the flickering flare of a cresset torch, she watched the guard turn and pace to one side.
Apparently having waited for this move and now out of the soldier’s line of sight, a figure in a dark cloak darted from the doorway into the bushes, then disappeared.
Eliza Darling recognized the figure. She had been married to it for eleven years.
ALL THESE WANDERERS moved furtively. But other, even more shadowy, creatures of the night were watching closely.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
He got a hundred on the back and you could see his back bone between his shoulder blades. The doctor order him to get another hundred on his bottom. His haunches was in such a jelly the doctor order him to be flog on the calves of his legs … The flesh and skin blew in my face as they shook off the cats.
—Joseph Holt, exiled Irish rebel (1800)
I
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, PERHAPS THREE HOURS AFTER SUNDAY had turned into Monday, long before the rising sun would kiss into bustling life the Lumber Yard on the corner of Bridge Street and the town’s main artery, George Street.
T WAS THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, PERHAPS THREE HOURS AFTER SUNDAY had turned into Monday, long before the rising sun would kiss into bustling life the Lumber Yard on the corner of Bridge Street and the town’s main artery, George Street.
While it was, in truth, a yard filled with stacks of milled timber under covers, the huge enclosure was much more than a storage space. Behind its high walls was a square ringed with low buildings. These were workshops that supplied the government with much of the sinews of the settlement’s daily existence. There were sheds for nailmakers, shoemakers, carpenters, tailors and a forge for blacksmiths.
Guarded by bored soldiers and prodded along by “trusty” convicts acting as overseers, the convicts were marched from and back to their respective barracks every workday. They wore overalls marked “PB” for Prisoners Barracks at Hyde Park and “CB” for the Carters Barracks at the southern end of the town. The latter jail took its name from the human “draught animals,” convicts who were yoked to pull brick-carts and similar wagons. The men worked at the Lumber Yard from sunrise to sunset, a twelve-hour day at this time of year.
While the yard rang with voices and the clangs and bangs of industry during most days, it should always have been deathly still, almost grave-like, during the dark hours.
But this early morning there were unexpected noises, sounds other than the normal murmur of the Tank Stream, trapped and running sluggishly in a channel beside the yard, or the rustle of foraging rats. The air was filled with the slaps of a hard object erratically striking a softer surface, irregular grunts of expelled breath followed by hissing intakes, and scuffling sounds of restless feet, almost the swish of a dancer. None of these noises, however, was loud enough to escape over the thick, high walls and shut wooden gate.
In any case, although the yard was only a few hundred yards away from, and almost in the line of sight of, the occupants of the main guardhouse at the redcoats’ barracks, the soldiers there took no interest in the closed workplace. And any passing constable on watch patrol would only see that the gate remained safely undisturbed.
Those noises that were somehow in rhythm with the dancing feet seemed to be interrupted regularly by muffled moans and sobs, and raspy, tortured breathing. The first range of sounds came from a scourger wielding a cat-o’-nine-tails; the noises in counterpoint came from a man being flogged to death.
IF IT WAS an odd time for a flogging, the equipment involved was standard in a time and place where the punishment was commonplace.
Convicts casually called twenty-five lashes a “tester” or a “Botany Bay dozen” to show disdain for the punishment; a “canary,” as well as being a nickname for a yellow-clad convict, described a hundred strokes—because the whip and the victim supposedly “sang” together. Such punishment could be meted out for a misdemeanor as minor as insolence to a jailer.
The least lashes administered was usually twenty-five; the average was fifty. Many men suffered up to 500; some died, if not of the physical wounding then of heart attack at the pain and shock, or even the raw fear. One prison commander ordered 26,024 strokes in 16 months; another once handed out 1,500 before he took breakfast.
Although a victim could be imprisoned in a pillory or in the stocks to receive the flagellation, or even simply be lashed to a tree, the most common official restraints were the triangles.
This prisoner in the Lumber Yard was confined thus. Three iron poles, each eight feet long, were planted in the ground to form legs that tapered to a common point higher than a man’s upraised hands. Similar sets stood throughout the settlement.
The scourger now wielded the cat’s nine long cords, knotted rockhard at each end and attached to the leather-bound handle, but to an irregular rhythm. In the shadow of the tall walls and with not even a new moon, the darkness dampened the standard army rate of three or four strokes a minute. The only light came, weakly, from a softly glowing whale-oil lantern set on the ground. It was sufficient to show that the victim was stripped to the waist, obviously male and tall. His tormentor remained a phantom figure.
The cruelty of the cat alone was not punishment enough to satisfy the bloody-minded torturer, who regularly dipped the tails into a nearby bucket of wet sand and lime, called the “pepper pot”—to load the knots with what felt like thousands of red-hot needle points.
After twenty minutes, the method of punishment surprisingly changed. The torturer threw the cat aside, exchanging it for a smaller, lighter weapon called a tawse, which was usually reserved for chastising juvenile offenders. It was a broad leather strap split at the end into narrow strips. Normally this would not break the skin, only raise bruising and welts. Schoolteachers often used the tawse.
This new attack had a strange variation, however. Before applying the tawse, the scourger attached a small blade that glittered even in the dim lamplight to one tail of the smaller whip. Only then did the thrashing continue, now at a more rapid rate.
Fifteen minutes later, the flogger’s onslaught stopped and the yard fell still. The gagging groans and tortured breathing had stopped. Sweaty fingers felt for a pulse in the neck of the man on the triangles. Nothing.
The killer detached the blade from the tawse tail and now used it to slash at the suspended man’s throat, then moved down to hack wounds first across the belly and then across both ankles.
The gag was ripped from the dead man’s face, sending a frothy spray of blood and spittle from the suddenly open, slack lips. He had bitten through his tongue. Into the drooling livid mouth, bloody fingers rammed a handful of crumbs shaken from a small bag.
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